Lightening Online

Image via Wikipedia One thing I really HATE to do is throw food into the rubbish bin. It’s a waste on many levels.

• A waste of money spent buying the food in the first place.
• A waste of my time shopping for the food.
• A waste of valuable resources tied up in growing/making, packaging and shipping that food.
• A waste of space when it gets added to landfill (not to mention the methane gas that is produced as a result of rotting food).

According to an article put together by Notebook magazine, “Australians are throwing out three million tonnes of food every year. That’s equivalent to 145 kilograms of food waste for each Australian.” I suspect figures in other western countries would reflect a similar level of wastage.

I find it positively scary the amount of rubbish going to landfill as a result of the food we eat (or don’t eat as the case may be).

Here are a few more staggering statistics when it comes to food wastage*:

• In Victoria and South Australia, 40 per cent of what people throw out is food.
• In Sydney, some bins contain up to 50 per cent food waste.
• Every single day, Britons throws away five million potatoes; one million slices of ham; four million apples; and seven million slices of bread.
• Australians are wasting $6 billion worth of food each year!!!!

* source: Notebook magazine

What Can We Do To Stop The Waste?

1. The Buck Stops Here

A global issue like this still comes down to the individual. I know I can do better when it comes to reducing how much food wastage we have. What about you?

2. Spread the Word

Notebook Magazine are having an ongoing campaign to encourage people to cut back on their own food wastage.

Those of us who are bloggers can do our bit by writing about this issue and sharing our ideas on how we can all reduce our food waste.

3. Share your ideas here

I’d like to write a follow up article next week sharing as many ideas as we can come up with. So place your ideas in the comments section here and I’ll compile them together into what could become a very handy resource for saving us all a few dollars as well as helping the environment.

If you have any good recipes for using up leftovers, I hope you’ll share those too. Feel free to email them to me (lightening at lighteningonline dot com) or share them on your own blog and let me know the link so I can link to it in my follow up post.

All recipes and tips shared will go into a draw for a free Notebook magazine. And if you submit them here as well, you might win some free Tupperware.

To Get You Started

Here are a few ideas from me to get those creative thinking caps working:

1. Menu Plan. This is possibly the most logical step when it comes to reducing waste. Menu plans help you use up what you have as well as making grocery shopping easier. You tend to buy what you actually need rather than guessing at what you’ll need. As much as I hate doing it, menu planning is an excellent way to cut costs in the grocery department.
2. Adequate Storage. Understand what foods need to be refrigerated or frozen, what foods should be kept out of the light and so forth. I LOVE my Tupperware for reducing my food spoilage rates (and yes, you can still order through my party although only in the next 24 hours).
3. Planned leftovers. We actually don’t have a lot of meal leftovers, other than when I’m choosing to stretch meat to a second (and sometimes 3rd) meal. On the occasions when we do, Farmboy and I tend to eat them for lunch (in fact, I don’t think we have enough leftovers for Farmboy’s liking at times).

I will post a couple of my own recipes when I write my follow-up article.

POLL: What Happens To Food Waste In Your Household?

Please take a moment to participate in the following poll on food waste:

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Let’s all do our bit to help reduce food wastage. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments section below.

Image via WikipediaI think that one of the biggest mistakes our society is making right now is the attitude of “disposability” when it comes to our STUFF.

I’m not sure if our “throw away society” can be blamed on consumers or manufacturers. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. Consumer demand for products at the lowest possible price leads to manufacturers cutting corners in their product quality. It also goes in the manufacturers favour to have items that require replacing more often.

So, who is the loser here? The environment. We’re chewing through resources at the rate of knots and throwing it all into landfill just as quickly.

To be honest, understanding the whole landfill issue was something I remained blissfully unaware of (well, to a certain degree at least) until we had to start dealing with our own waste. We don’t have a convenient garbage pick-up service here. We have to deal with our own.

And it can be quite a SHOCK to the system to have in front of you a couple of years worth of landfill that has been generated by you and only you.

However, here is where I find a certain amount of conflict. Often-times, frugality and environmentalism go hand in hand.

That isn’t ALWAYS the case though.

Anything that involves technology may well create a conflict between frugality and environmentalism.

If you buy the cheaper model, will it end up in landfill quicker?

If you buy the more expensive model, will it’s technology be outdated faster than it wears out? And do the more expensive models really last longer?

Farmboy and I were caught in this dilemma about a year ago. Our television died. Do we repair it or put the cost of repair toward a new television?

We thought we’d done the “right” thing when we purchased it originally, opting for a Sony rather than a cheaper brand.

However, it was only a 51cm television and with Farmboy’s failing eyesight, was this a prime opportunity (ie excuse) to purchase something larger, with newer technology?

After discussions with our local electronics store, we decided that perhaps it was worth fixing. And spent around $100 repairing the television.

A couple of days ago, the television died again. Making us question the sensibility of having spent money on it 12 months ago, only to have it now no longer working again.

I guess this time we’ll replace it. I feel disappointed that our efforts to do what we felt was the “right” thing haven’t paid off. And now we’re left wondering what we’ll do the next time we’re faced with the decision of “repair or replace”.

What would you have done in our position?

Are there certain things you would repair rather than replace?

Do you find it easy to put environmental considerations ahead of frugal ones?

Can anyone recommend a television brand for under $500 (we haven’t decided on a size yet but preferably larger than 51cm - not that we fully understand the way the sizing works these days)? We’re thinking it’s not really worth spending extra money for a “better quality” brand but there are so many alternatives out there, it’s hard to know which way to go.

Well it’s officially no longer June but I think I’m going to need my “reduce the trash” challenge to run for a little longer than a month.

DH and I have been working outside this afternoon and there’s been lots of recycling going on.

Yummy juicy weeds and snails and millipedes from the garden have gone to the chooks. They’re having a great time scratching through my offerings looking for bugs and will nicely turn them into eggs for me. In a day or so I’m thinking I’ll gather up what’s left of the weeds (they don’t eat them all) and dump them into the compost. Hopefully the chooks will leave some droppings on some of them too to add some fertiliser to my compost. We have a long term plan to make better use of our chooks in turning and fertilising our garden soil. That requires a bit of infrastructure to be built so for now I just do what I can by hand (when I have the time and energy).

DH has been cutting up some old plastic bottles for me to cover some of our poor little seedings that have been getting munched to death by an array of bugs. Fingers crossed this helps them get to a stronger stage so they can withstand the bugs. We’re just making things up as we go along here so who knows whether this is going to work or not. In the meantime, it’s helping us reduce our trash.

DH is really on a roll this afternoon. He’s found an old wooden gate that he’s going to sand back and paint. He wants to build a gate so that the backyard is accessible from the front area of the house (will make it easier for the kids to come to the back door instead of the front door when they get home from the bus). That’ll save us a few $$ in materials and adds to our recycling/reducing landfill efforts.

I was asking DH the other day how our quantity of rubbish is going and apparently we are doing better. We fill a green wheelie bin around once a fortnight which I don’t think is too bad. I’m not entirely sure that includes our office rubbish though as DH often collects that just before he does a rubbish run. Hopefully we’ll soon have a shredder and can compost more of our paper waste.

So that’s where we’re up to for now. Heading in the right direction but with plenty of room yet for improvement.